Lawrence reviews Sara Ahmed's On Being Included on Jotwell

I reviewed Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included on Jotwell, here: bit.ly/1cdXfyg

After reading Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia1 and attending the Symposium organized around the book by the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, I came home to find Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life waiting in my mailbox (this Jot is about On Being Included, although I’m quite prepared to say that I like Presumed Incompetent (lots) as well). The combination of these two books, both filled with personal stories and institutional insight, cracked my vision of my own place in the legal academy, and the “practice” of diversity, wide open. I read this work as a person who shares a (not surprising, really) number of experiences-as-academic with Ahmed. I read it just after reading the often deeply personal essays in Presumed Incompetent. I also read it as a person who has worked to avoid being noticed as “the problem” while trying to maintain a commitment to anti-racist work. These days, that means deep concern that my own strategies and efforts are nothing more than thinly veneered cooptation. All of these things, I think, amplified the impact of the book on me. But I still do not hesitate to recommend it to you, Jotwell reader

Go and read the full review, if you have a few minutes.

If you aren’t following Jotwell: Equality (and the other sections too), maybe consider it? A good way to have other people curate some of the flood of publications. Also, that picture of me on jotwell – more than 10 years old, so, yes. Especially in light of the fact that I can update social media 10x a day, I can probably manage a new photo.